Game Progress Update #73

Hello world, and welcome to the seventy third Dev with Dave game progress update!

It’s been a busy couple of weeks, fortunately, not in the catastrophic disaster filled way that the previous month or two seemed to have been. Although both the oven and my kettle broke, which are pretty disaster like from where I sit. I was boiling water in a saucepan to make tea with for more days than I care to think.

However, I have a new kettle now and hopefully, we will be getting a new oven in the next few days 🤞.

This week I have spent my time at the keyboard working on the In progress list on the Trello board. And the time AFK I used to work on the pre-launch marketing drive.

What’s on the cards today?

There are two cards still waiting to be done in the list on the Trello, these are..

• Increase difficulty & rewards of daily missions
• Level difficulty

Increase difficulty & rewards of daily missions

Carrying on from last weeks update >here<, I have been playing and checking the game most days and have made the following discoveries.

At first glance, everything seems to be working correctly. But a little more digging soon revealed that the first time the game is run in a day, it works fine. But every subsequent time it’s run, for some reason the reward isn’t being calculated correctly and displays as 10 when it should say 20.

The target calculation seems to be working properly. I had shortened the number of times a player had to complete a mission type in order to speed up testing. I managed to get 3 of the mission types levelled up to at least the second level.

When I was getting ready to mark it off as done, I noticed it wasn’t working properly (Typical). It took a few days to even verify that it was happening, as the issue only occurs on the first run of each day.

Unfortunately it proved to be a somewhat troublesome bug to locate. I ran out of time before I managed to resolve it. But I will resume again next week.

Pre-launch marketing plan

The other thing I spend most of my away from my desk time doing, was working on the pre-launch marketing plan. I will of course be following my own advice from the blogs I posted on promotion earlier. You can read the first one >here<.

The plan is to start building hype for the game as soon as possible. I will be using organic social media and paid adverts to try and grow an audience. Although as the launch grows closer, I am concerned about what kind of budget I will end up having for that.

I have found a few target-demographic type groups to join on Facebook. These will be investigated once they have accepted my requests, and if they are suitable for my needs, then I will see about posting regularly and becoming part of the community.

I have also decided on a few suitable hashtags to use for other social media. Although I haven’t yet decided exactly what platforms I will be using for promotion as yet.

Quite a large part of the planning, will be deciding what media assets I will need for the various posts and ads over the duration of the prelaunch.

I also am planning on using a landing page with a form to capture email addresses.

I will share more details on this in the next update, but I am aware that the time is getting on and I am already late publishing this post.

That’s all for now

I think that’s all I have time for this update. I will as always be back in two weeks, on the 8th of December. But then I will be taking some time off from sitting behind the computer to spend some time with the family over Christmas.

Normal service will resume in the New Year, and the first Update of 2024 will be on the 5th January.

So until then, I will see you all in a fortnight.

Game Progress Update #72

Hello world! And welcome to the seventy second Dev with Dave Game Progress Update! I feel like this last couple of weeks has been a little better than the last one.

There has still been plenty of unwanted drama keeping me away from the keyboard, but I have managed to get a bit done to the game. I’m starting to think I should give up my career as a developer to instead write for the soap operas.

I even had to contend with Trello going down while I was trying to finish this blog post! Which is most unusual. Anyway, lets have a look at what I did manage to get done this week..

Plan for this update

Carrying on from the last progress update, there are the following things to do in the In progress column of the Trello board this update.

• Review phase 1 cards
• Increase difficulty and rewards of daily missions
• Level difficulty

There are only a handful of the review phase 1 cards left. These are ones which needed boosts to be unlocked and purchased first, which I didn’t have the coin for. This time round I will edit the game to award me several thousand coins. I couldn’t do this last update as I was away from the PC, playing the compiled version on my phone.

Review phase 1 cards

Once I had added the line which awarded the player 250,000 coins, it was straight forward to test the remaining phase 1 cards.

It only took an hour or so to play the game enough to have completed the last few cards. Well, to be honest, I probably could have done it in half the time, but the game is quite addictive, lol.

The cards were fairly straight forward to check. They were things like the head start not playing the shield sound effect, or purchasing or using boosts not changing the UI values accordingly.

I also made sure that I removed the line of code which award the extra coins for testing purposes, when I finished testing.

Increase difficulty and rewards of daily missions

Reading back over the code..

At first glance, it didn’t seem as though I had added much in the way of code to handle the progression of the daily missions.

There was a missionTotals[] variable, but there was nothing in the comments or the like describing what it’s purpose was. I had actually commented it’s definition, but nothing helpful about what I was intending to use it for.

A little digging later, and I found that in both the load and save daily mission data functions, I had referred to the variable in the comments as “the mission totals count”. It’s my belief that I had intended this array to store the number of times each daily mission had been completed.

No matter how many times I say about HOW VERY IMPORTANT commenting your code is, for exactly this reason; I still find myself causing extra work by not doing it.

Making some changes

Going from here, I added a second variable to the type which is to track the current level of each daily mission. The plan is that once the specific mission types Total has exceeded a set value, then the total is reset to zero and the level value is increased. The level value is used to determine the difficulty and reward of the mission.

added a line to the calculate the reward function for missions, which just times the level value by ten to get the reward value.

Changing the target value however, was a lot trickier. Each mission type has its own initial target value ranging from 1 to 50. Ideally, I need to write a function like the one which calculates the reward value. This would allow me to As I felt on a bit pressured for time, I am kludging it for now, by simply multiplying the initial value by the mission type level value. I can always revisit it in the future if the values need changing.

I need to get the test build uploaded so I can test this. In order to check the code works, I need to play the game for five days consecutively. (Unless I cheekily change the value, so I can check it later this evening once the roll-over has happened 🙂 )

I still need to verify that this all works, but that will take a few days unfortunately. So I won’t know the results until next week.

Level difficulty

I didn’t manage to get any coding related to this last card done this time round. I did however get some thinking done about how this will work.

The issue is that as the game speed increases, it makes some of the zones very tricky to get through. It can leave the game feeling as though the difficulty suddenly ramps up, disproportionately so at times. So the plan for this card is to devise something to lessen this effect.

I’m unsure if I want to implement any of the following methods to try and add a bit more playability to the game.,

• create a system which adapts the levels by increasing the distance between obstacles slightly.
• Create several new levels, and develop a system to separate slow and faster levels.
• Tweak the existing levels so they work better with a wider range of speeds

Ideally I would like to create at least twice as many zones as there are already, to prevent the game from becoming too repetitive, too quickly.

GDD Update

As well as all of the above stuff, I took the opportunity of updating the GDD with all the changes which were marked in the completed cards I reviewed from phase 1.

There aren’t many changes. The biggest ones were relating to the daily prizes and missions. There are a few minor changes however as well.

Click the link below to download it.

That’s all for now

Once again I’ll be back in another fortnight with more news about the game.

I’m aware that I need to be working on the marketing strategy, especially considering how near to completion the game is. Aside from one video trailer I made, I’ve not really done anything on this apart from a few pages of notes. I’m not sure if I should include this in the progress update, or perhaps write a separate blog post about it. (Or maybe both, lol, who knows)

Anyway, I hope you’ve enjoyed reading this post. I’ll see you again in two weeks.

Game Progress Update #71

Hello World! And welcome to the seventy first Dev with Dave Game progress Update.

I’m sad to say that it’s been another of those weeks where nothing has gone to plan. I’m already two days late starting this blog post.

Unfortunately, my girlfriend’s diabetes put her in hospital again this week, so my available time to work on Flappy-vaders has been dramatically reduced. It doesn’t help that my car is off the road as well. So, I have had to be finding other ways of getting around.

Taxis are the easiest and quickest, but most expensive. We also have those Lime electric scooters and bikes around here, which are cheaper than taxis but are slower. They are great fun though. Lastly there are busses. Busses are slow and uncomfortable and take an age to get anywhere. They are cheap though.

I’ve also spent more time than usual simply walking places. I like walking, it gives me chance to listen to books on Audible and enjoy the scenery.

Anyhoo, lol, In the little time I have had spare, I have managed to get a little bit of work done on Flappy-vaders. Let’s dive into what’s been done since the last update, without further ado.

Reviewing Phase 1 Trello Cards

In the last Game Progress Update, I finished with one remaining card on the Trello “In progress” column. That was to review all the cards which had been completed and moved to the “Under review” column for evaluation.

The one solitary benefit of my girlfriend being in hospital was that I got to spend a few hours sitting in a waiting room playing Flappy-vaders and working my way through the cards on the column.

I won’t list the individual cards here, as I think that would be a little dull tbh. But feel free to check out the Trello board >here< and see for yourself.

The only ones I couldn’t verify were the ones which involved unlocking and using the boosts. As I was away from the computer and playing the compiled version on my phone, I couldn’t simply add more coins to my total so I could play it.

Planning Phase 2

I have also managed to get some work done on the planning for the difficulty increases as the player proceeds with the game. I’m already thinking 1000 coins is too much for the boost unlocks.

I’m planning on increasing the difficulty and reward for the daily missions as the player progresses through them. For example, the player would need to complete “Travel 25 distance” mission maybe two or three times, before the distance increases to 50 and the reward gets doubled as well.

I’d also quite like to tweak some of the trophy values. They have all been tested now, and the harder ones need to be made a little tougher.

And lastly I would like to at least double the number of zones, with new patterns for the obstacles and enemies.

That’s all for this week

I’m happy to announce that my girlfriend was discharged from hospital after a couple of nights stay. She’s not a hundred percent better yet, but I’m glad she’s home.

Work on the game will proceed as normal next time round hopefully, as I feel I have had more than my fair share of bad luck and interruptions.

In the next update I will attempt to look more deeply into the promotional strategy I will be using for the game, as well as trying to get on with making the Phase two changes to the gameplay.

Game Progress Update #70

Hello world! And welcome to the seventieth Dev with Dave Game Progress Update!

It just occurred to me that when we reach the seventy eighth game progress update, that means I’ll have been working on Flappy-vaders for three years in real time. Since I’m only working on it part time, this equates to around a year, perhaps a year and a half of actual development time.

(I certainly wasn’t expecting this to take quite as long as it has when I began this journey! 😅)

We’re in the final stretch now, I really should be getting busy thinking about how I’m going to promote the game when it’s released (And before!), and designing, if not creating assets to use in the promotion.

I’ve not really thought much about promoting the game since Update 66. Which is when I last worked on the promotional video. (It’s >here< if you want to have a look)

This time round

I have moved three cards into the In Progress list on the Trello board.

• Add a back button to the daily prize awarded screen
• Make icons for the Daily Missions screen
• Review phase 1 things in the Under Review list.

Add a back button to the Daily prize awarded screen

I was hoping this would be a simple case of adding a UI element to the existing UI page when I selected this task off the Things to do list on the Trello. But when I checked the UI pages I couldn’t see it.

I had a look again at the screen in action, and saw that it appeared to be a sprite overlay, rather than a UI page, as the scratcher UI page is visible underneath. This rules out my original fix, and means it’ll probably take a lot longer to sort out. 😞

After some investigation, I found where the code for the overlay sprite was being called from. It was a straight forward job to pass the function a reference to the UI and add a back button. This code could hide and show at the same time as the sprite overlay. All I’d need to do is ensure that the button’s draw depth is above the overlay panel.

With that in mind, I set off the the UI script to find a back button from an existing page to copy and paste onto the scratcher page.

Except.

There aren’t any? All the other UI pages just use the “Left facing triangle” icon in the top left corner of the screen.

I’m not sure why I thought the game needed a back button on this particular screen, but it seems to break continuity of the UI design to add one. Because of this, I have decided not to it after all.

Make icons for the Daily Missions screen

A bit of an oversight perhaps, but I noticed the Daily missions screen had only grey boxes instead of icons. Fixing this was added to the Phase 2, the polishing phase.

There are I think, five types of Daily Mission. Each one needs it’s own icon to represent it.

• Score x amount of points
• Travel x distance
• Collect a daily prize
• Play x number of games
• Collect x coins

Initially I sat down at my desk with some paper and a pencil and started thinking. Some of the icons were obvious to me. I could simply reuse a coin icon from another menu, for example.

Even with the limited 22 x 22 pixel size, It didn’t take long to create the several of the icons.

Traveling distance however, was proving to be quite a challenge. I couldn’t think of a single concept or idea to represent traveling distance which would fill the tiny grey square.

I finally ended up using ChatGPT and Bind AI Image generator to help me come up with some ideas. You can read all about my experience using AI in this blog post.

The image above shows a few of the icons I created in place in the Daily Missions screen. The bottom one is the travel distance Icon which I had difficulties with. Until ultimately I sought the help of AI.

Review completed tasks from Phase 1

With the other two tasks out the way. It meant I had chance to review some of the cards in the Under Review list on Trello.

This meant I had to sit for a few hours with the Trello open, playing Flappy-vaders! It’s a tough job, lol, but someone has to do it.

I quickly got into a habit of reading the next card, and having a turn at the game. Fortunately the first few cards were easy enough to check in a single game.

Overall I think I managed to move 15 cards from under review to the completed list. At least before it was time to finish the blog post and do all the social media as well! lol

There are still loads of cards to verify, so I expect I’ll still be doing this next week. A lot of them mean editing the game so I have enough coins to buy unlocks and powerups so I can test some of the other cards.

That’s all for now

That’s all I have time for now I’m afraid.

Sorry the social media posting has been a bit sporadic the last few weeks. Other things have been getting in the way. Sadly real life things which I can’t just push to one side.

I will definitely be back in a fortnight, and I’ll try and do a better job with the social media stuff 😊

Until next time..

Game Progress Update #69

Hello World! And welcome to the sixty ninth Dev with Dave Game Progress Update.

It seems I am still having to put in an extra hour a day at least playing “Dad’s taxi” and dropping off the kids places when I would rather be working on Flappy-vaders.

Or at least I was until yesterday, when the car broke down on the side of the road. *sigh*

It’s probably going to be at least a week till I can get the car looked at, which is unfortunate. But at least it means I have fewer excuses for not working on the game! lol.

Let me tell you about what I have done this update.

Stutter during gameplay

The last Known bug/issue card in the In Progress column on the Trello was Stutter during gameplay.

This card was added to the Known bugs/issues column on the 1st march 2023, so it’s a fairly recent issue. It does specifically say on the card that the issue occurs on mobile during testing.

I have a feeling that this was relating to some screen settings which I altered a while back when I noticed that the game was running at 120fps on the Android test device I was using.

I spent several hours testing for this, (Does this really count as work? lol.) And unfortunately I have been unable to replicate the issue. The test team have also put a few hours into playing the game and haven’t mentioned any stuttering.

It definitely still happens on the PC, but as the game is targeted for mobile, I am going to mark this card as finished, and move it over to the Under Review column.

Phase 2

Having completed all of the initial stuff, by all accounts I should warrant some kind of celebration, followed by a break. But I feel like the project has taken too long as it is, so instead I’m going to dive straight into Phase 2.

Phase 2 is what I call the next step in the games development. Now all the systems are working as intended, it is time to work on developing the longevity of the game.

Although Flappy-vaders is designed to be played casually, in short bursts while waiting for the bus, or the microwave. There are aspects to keep players returning to the game. The upgrade/boost stores, the trophies, the prize scratchers etc.

I want to add a system to increase the difficulty of the challenges for the daily missions. As well as the rewards after the player has completed a few missions. This will have maybe five grades of difficulty/reward.

I also want to add timers to the reward ads and buttons. These are to limit the number of times the player can get a free daily scratch card.

I also want to ensure that the trophies are balanced. Currently I feel that they are all achievable too quickly.

Lastly there are a few changes I have decided to make to the UI.

I have added all these cards to the Trello, and assigned a couple to the In progress column.

First Phase 2 card completed!

Apparently I had the Fix bugs in Known bugs/issues column as a card in the Things To Do as part of Phase 2, lol.

As I have spent the last several weeks working through the list of bugs, and fixing them all, I think I can mark this one off as completed.

They all still need reviewing, and moving over to the completed column. But that’s a job for another day. I have created a card in the Trello for it.

Another test version uploaded

As all the bugs (That I was aware of anyway) had been fixed, it seemed like an ideal time to compile and upload a new version to the store.

If you already have Flappy-vaders installed, then it will automatically update soon. If not head over to the store page and update it from there.

That’s all for now.

As always I will be back in two weeks with the next update. Hopefully I will have a couple of phase 2 items crossed off the list.

If you want to join the test team, then its not to late. Just drop me a message on any of the channels, or simply email. I’ll get back to you soon.

Until then..

Dave 🙂

Game Progress Update #68

Hello world, and welcome to the sixty eighth Dev with Dave Game Progress Update.

It’s not been the best couple of weeks for working on this. As you all know, I am doing it in my spare time, and unfortunately my girlfriend is once again laid up with a bad back. Which means that I have not had anywhere near as much free time as I would have liked.

Combine that with running “Dad’s Taxi” for the children who seem to have had an abundance of appointments, and you’ll end up with a slightly stressed Dave who hasn’t had much chance to work on Flappy-vaders.

Throw in a week of ridiculous weather as well, and you start to get an idea of how this last two weeks have gone.

Fortunately we have the Hot tub set up in the garden still (It’s usually packed away by now) so I have been able to cool off in the water on the worst of the hot days.

Anyway, enough of the boring stuff. Let me get on and tell you about what I have done to the game this update.

The plan for this fortnight

After all the bugs I got fixed in the last update, here are only two bugs left in the known bugs/issues column on the Trello board.

• Distance Issues
• Stutter during gameplay

I am hoping to get both of these fixed and maybe even have time to start on the Phase 2 stuff.

Distance issues

I’m hoping this will be a simple bug to fix, so I have chosen this to be the first thing I look at.

The problem is that the Daily missions and the Trophies seem to check the distance travelled differently. For example, I completed a daily mission (Travel 25m), but the Trophy (Travel 25m) was not.

I need to look to see whether the code which compares the distances in the two cases is the same, or at least using the same calculation to work out distance.

Step one is to look and find where the two checks are made. This involves simply reading through the code and following its order of execution. Although its not a particularly fun or interesting thing to do.

I found the code which updated the daily mission distance variable in the IncreasePlayerScore() function. It is increased by 1 every time the player travels 144px (in game size), it’s the size of an old 4:3 TV episode on a widescreen device.

The other piece of the riddle was in the Trophies script. It was however calculating the distance in a completely different way.

Once I had found the issues, it was a fairly simple job to get both sets of code producing the same results.

Stutter during gameplay

Sadly I didn’t get this one finished this update. I managed to get as far as thinking about how I am going to determine what is causing it.

I haven’t even managed to grab any video of it happening. As I cannot replicate the issue on demand as yet. Intermittent problems are the worst kind.

I’m certain AGK Studio has some commands for performance checking. I will look into those and see if they might be helpful for this.

Phase 2

I did manage to get some thought put into Phase 2 however during some AFK time.

Phase 2 is mostly about adding longevity to the game play. I will be adding systems to increase the reward and difficulty of the daily missions; as well as looking into how we can adapt the levels depending on the speed of the player.

I’m leaning towards creating more levels and then give each level a speed rating, so the are not selected if the game is going to quickly or slowely. Then I just need to create several sets of levels so no variety is lost as the player speeds up.

Anyway, I shall talk more about phase 2 once the stuttering bug has been resolved.

That’s all for now

Once again I have run out of time, and the deadline for publishing this blog post draws near. So I shall sign off for now. I’ll be back in two weeks, with another fun packed and exciting* game progress update.

See you all next time!

* May not actually be fun packed or exciting

Game Progress Update #67

Hello World, and welcome to the sixty seventh Dev with Dave Game Progress Update.

Thankfully this time round I did manage to find some time to work on Flappy vaders. Since I started this project I have definitely had a lot less free time to work on it than I expected.

But I don’t think I’ve done too badly. The game really does seem to be taking shape. And it definitiely helps with motivation knowing tha the end is nearly in sight! 🙂

Let me tell you what I have done this time round.

The plan for this fortnight

So this fortnight I am back on the bug fixes. There are three bugs in the In progress column of the Trello. Now I have finished working on the promotional video, I shall attempt to finish them off as well.

• Bullet X speed issue.
• Upgrades store issue.
• Scratch card prize issue.

Before I can do anything, I must remove the edits I made for the video in the previous progress update.

Removing the edits.

As I said in an earlier post, I’ve employed two methods to help make removing the edits I’d previously made a little easier.

Firstly I have written a log in my OneNote of the changes I made. And secondly, I have used a Keyword in the comments so I can ctrl-f and find each edited section.

This only took an hour or so to complete, using the keyword to search for changes. If I discover any further issues, I will refer back to the log of code edits.

Scratch card prize issue

When the player gets two pairs on a scratch card, the game awards the lowest prize value. This seems wrong to me, and the player should be awarded the highest.

I fixed this by reversing the direction that the game searched through the fruit by value. This way the player should be awarded the prize with the greatest value.

I would like to say that this is done, but I would be irresponsible to just leave it without testing it. I’ve obviously ran it a few times now just to make sure it worked ok. But statistically, the chances of getting a pair of pairs is remote, and I have run out of daily prize cards. Because of this I have decided to edit the code so I can control the outcome.

I altered two lines to get the game working closer to how I wanted. I changed the line which selected the random fruit from random[0,9] to random[0,1] so only two possible fruits could be selected.

The second line was one to award myself an extra 10 game cards every time I run the app 😉 lol. I will be removing this line before the next test build is released.

Then all I had to do was play a few scratch cards until I got one with two pairs. Then see which prize it awarded me. It didn’t take too many turns until I found one, and I could verify the code worked properly now.

Upgrades Store Issue

This is one of the pain in the ass bugs which I have tried to look into before. There is a note on the Trello stating that I couldn’t reproduce the issue. This is from back in June when I last looked at it.

As you well know it is an awful lot harder to fix a bug if you cannot reproduce it.

Fortunately, I think I have managed to reproduce it this morning, which is nice. Lets hope this means I’m halfway towards fixing it!

Explaining the issue

The above picture is from the Upgrades store page. Each panel has an icon, an upgrade progress indicator, a line of text and a price with a coin icon.

For some reason, all of these seem to work perfectly except for the Self destruct one.

The line of text should only read Unlock when there are no yellow squares lit up. That is to say before the player purchases an upgrade for the first time.

Once the first upgrade has been purchased to unlock the item, the text should change to “upgrade” instead of “Unlock”, and the price should change.

However, as you can see in the image above, although its working ok for the Head start, it is not working as it’s intended for the self destruct powerup.

Neither the text nor the price has changed. The price is supposed to increase with each upgrade purchased.

To add to the confusion, once the Self destruct is fully upgraded, the price and the text do actually change. However, neither of the things it changes to are correct.

Oddly enough, filling in the yellow blocks seems to work correctly. My first stop was the UI script to see what happened when the button is pressed to buy an upgrade.

Fixing the issue

After a couple of hours of running the game, testing, reading code and repeating, I finally found the problem! (Although I did go for a 20 minute walk outside to get some air. I find it helps thinking and problem solving)

When I wrote this, I had actually copied and pasted the code handling each of the panels on this page. They are all virtually identical, with only a few minor differences.

Whilst doing this, I had apparently overlooked a variable. *sigh*

// Updates price if its not max level, otherwise clear price (and hide coin?)
SetUpgradeText(upgrades.selfDestructUpgrade, ui, 64, "SELF DESTRUCT")

Instead of selfDestructUpgrade, the function was being passed the data for the headStartUpgrade instead. Since none of these values were changing, neither were the text or price being displayed!

At least it was a simple fix once I had spotted the error. 🙂

Bullet X Speed issue

Lastly, I looked at the bullet x speed issue bug.

When the Anti-aircraft guns shoot, their bullets seem to drift left, which was noticeable when playing the game.

After checking the maths to make sure I had the angles and Sin/Cos correct, I started to experiment with alternative solutions.

The first idea was to alter the angle of travel. Since the sprite was drawn in the correct angle, there was no need to rotate it. All I had to do was change the bulletDirection constant.

This seemed to fix the problem, although it took a while to determine the best angle to resolve the issue. I also had to adjust the spawn point of the bullets a little.

All that was left to do was leave a note on the trello card and slide it over to the under review column.

In the next update

So that leaves us with just two bugs or known issues to fix. There is still the discrepancy as to how distance is measured between different types of challenges, and the occasional stutter which seems to have appeared.

Hopefully I will be able to get these fixed for the next update, then it will be a case of running through the Under review column and ensuring that all the bugs are fixed and working as expected.

Then it will be on to phase 2! Which is where I add some extra detail to the game mechanics to increase the longevity of the gameplay, as well as some extra zones and skins for the scratch cards (Possibly)

And that’s all for now

But, for now it is getting close to 3pm so I should wrap this up and get the social media posts prepped and ready for posting.

I will as always be back in two weeks with the next update. 🙂

Game Progress Update #66

Hello world! Welcome to the sixty sixth Dev with Dave game progress update.

What an absolute time of it I’ve had this last couple of weeks! Life seems determined to keep me away from the computer. I’ve even struggled to keep on top of my day job, let alone find some time to work on Flappy-vaders.

The absolute pinnacle of this was on Tuesday when I had to go for a SIX HOUR trip in the car to go and pick up one of the children, who had become stranded by the coast. The joys of parenthood. *sigh*

Still, I have managed to get some work done on the project.

What I had planned…

Carrying on from the last update, I had decided to do the following two tasks relating to the promotional video.

• Revise wording on the text card for the promo video
• Ensure first six seconds of gameplay has a powerup!

As well as some work on getting the last few known bugs/issues fixed. Although sadly, this didn’t happen.

Recording new footage

The first thing I decided to do was to try and get some new footage for the first six seconds of the video, only this time it had to include a pickup floating by.

So, I opened up OBS and AGK Studio, and after making the edits to ensure that the game starts off at the correct speed and in the right zone.

Once I’d obtained the footage I needed, It was time to switch to Hitfilm.

There then was a few minutes wasted as I updated the software to the latest version. If I haven’t said before, I absolutely always update to the lastest version of everything, as soon as an update is available. So even though I probably could have skipped this and saved a few minutes, I didn’t.

Then all that was left to do was to trim the footage so I had the six seconds I needed.

Editing the text

Next was changing the text on the cards which are displayed over the video.

I’m not happy with the one which reads “Collect untold wealth and treasures”, And since one of the larger issues I had with the first draft of the video was that it didn’t mention the pickups or upgrade, I think this card should be edited to reflect this.

After some deliberation, I decided on “Collect coins and buy upgrades”.

Creating the card was a simple case of opening Paint.net and creating the new card. I used the old card to ensure the text was in the correct position.

Finishing touches.

Once I had created the new assets and imported them into the project, swapping them for the old assets was a relatively straight forward process.

For the video, I just had to select an appropriate 6 seconds of footage, trim off the excess and delete the audio before slotting it into place on the timeline. Since I had simply overwritten the old text card with the new one, it had just loaded in with the rest of the project.

Lastly came exporting the video and uploading it to YouTube. Exporting only took a few seconds, as did uploading it.

Above is the v2 of the video. Let me know what you think 🙂

That’s all for now

Fingers crossed I will be back in another two weeks with the next progress update. Assuming that things go much more to plan than this week has.

Until next time 🙂